“What is The Cloud?”
Mighty big question, let me tell you. Cloud computing is the biggest buzzword to hit the IT industry since Local-Area-Networking. I’m serious. And it’s got the potential to be as big of a deal. A cloud-managed infrastructure is what every major IT installation will be based on by 2015. There will be legacy boxes floating around, but when you can suck up your legacy box into a cloud infrastructure, liberating it from the iron it’s running on, why wouldn’t you?
Let’s get back on topic: what is The Cloud? And why is everyone calling it “The Cloud?” As in, “Let’s run that in The Cloud.” Or, “We’re hosting it in The Cloud.” As if there’s only one. Seriously, there’s more than one. And that’s a good thing. Every pundit and talking head in the tech industry is talking about it, but I honestly think that maybe 30% of them know what they’re talking about - and even they can’t agree.
Here’s the simple, real-deal definition:
The Cloud (n): A marketing buzzword that is essentially meaningless, tagging some service or offering to a nebulous idea of Resource-Based Computing.
Remember old-school network diagrams? When you connect your network to an outside source, the traditional symbol is a cloud. Meaning, ’some network or bunch of stuff out there, but we don’t know and don’t care for the scope of this diagram.’ So you wave your hands and draw a cloud. More recently, that cloud on your network diagram means The Internet. This is where the cloud term came from, folks. Some cloudy thing beyond the scope of the document. That’s what marketers are using when they say “The Cloud.”
That Resource-Based Computing term I just used is closer to what people really mean when they talk about The Cloud. Every major IT broker and their brother offer their own cloud-like solution. Microsoft is getting closer to Azure. Amazon has EC2 (which I’ll be blogging about extensively). Sun is probably going to be bought by someone, but they’ve got the Grid Engine. Google has AppEngine. And they’re all different. They all work differently. So what draws them together?
Resource-Based Computing. It’s the idea that computing is a resource that you can bill for, rather than buy outright. It’s rooted in modern operating systems, with the ultimate hardware abstraction layer - the whole damn computer. You build your app to fit the resource you want to tap, depending on your level of skill or commitment to the nuts and bolts of the machine. The more abstract, the less control you have over your environment, but the less you have to manage day-to-day. Like everything else, it’s a tradeoff.
Over the next week, I’m going to look deeper at the different cloud computing options, and where they fit on a strategic level. As we go, and as I experiment, I’ll post technical nitty-gritty details where I can.
